57 Reasons not to be Cheerful, one, two, three...

Any large public event is always a balance between freedom of expression and movement, safety, and civil liberty. The “Rile Widding” was no exception. Except it was – it marked a new watershed in the shifting of the balance away from freedom and towards outright repression. I have already remarked that there seems to be a disparity between Brian Haw camping in Parliament Square (not allowed) and thousands of people camping out in The Mall (allowed) and this double standard is indicative of the sneaky, insidious way in which major public events are used to undermine civil liberties. Presumably if Boris Johnson wants to prosecute the people who broke the law on Thursday night in the Mall, he has plenty of CCTV and TV footage to allow him to identify the offenders. I await his next action with interest.

These are the “facts” behind what was “hailed” as a “successful” security operation. I am going to quote this at length from the BBC because it bears some deconstruction. It is a curiously jumbled and un-focused piece that reads as if it is the police official statement merely rehashed and regurgitated.

Scotland Yard has hailed the security operation surrounding the royal wedding as an "amazing success" despite 57 arrests around its security zone. About half the arrests were for breach of the peace and a man was held for an alleged sex assault on a girl, aged 14.

OK, no-one would argue with that. Breach of the peace and a sex assault, it all sounds fairly straightforward.

Ten people carrying climbing gear and anti-monarchy placards were arrested near Charing Cross. Other arrests were for drunk and disorderly, criminal damage, theft and over a suspected environmental protest. Three people were held in the Covent Garden area over the alleged demonstration, police said.

To be frank, I am surprised that the BBC didn’t look into the anti-monarchy and environmental protests more closely. They seem to be accepting of the police lumping these in with drunk and disorderly, criminal damage and theft. In this manner, legitimate protest is subtly criminalised. Were these people charged, and if so, with what?

Anti-terror powers were used to arrest one man who was seen taking suspicious photographs of transport hubs and security personnel in the Charing Cross area.

This is the sort of thing that is an example of the insidious erosion of our civil liberties – and, of course, it will now continue right up to the Olympic Games and beyond, if they can get away with it.

Three others were held over drug offences and four for allegedly carrying an offensive weapon.

OK, we’re back to the straightforward stuff again. But why not make some effort to group the arrests by type? Why mix up protests with criminal activity?

Met Police Assistant Commissioner Lynne Owens said the success of the overall policing operation showed that the force could handle security for next year's Olympic Games. She said her 5,000 officers should be "immensely proud" of their role in the "happy and safe" event. She admitted to pre-event "nerves" and defended the decision to carry out a string of pre-event raids as "entirely justified".

“Entirely justified”? Justified to whom, justified by what? Is she saying she has some inside information that she is not telling us? Were the people who were arrested pre-emptively some sort of terrorist threat? Because I have a feeling that this is just the police justifying themselves to themselves, with no scrutiny.

Officers questioned masked anti-monarchy protesters in Soho Square as a huge security operation took place around Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey and The Mall.

So who were these masked anti-monarchy protestors? How many of them were there, were they charged with anything? Are they part of the 57 arrests?

Thousands of police officers created a "ring of steel" around the venues. Snipers took to rooftops and undercover officers mingled among the crowds

Sort of gives the lie to the “carefree, joyous celebration”, doesn’t it?

More than 90 people were banned from the area and up to 80 VIPs were granted personal protection.

Again – “banned from the area” – under what pretext, what law, what judicial process has been gone through to be able to ban people from walking through the streets of their own capital city. If we are getting to the state where we are having people “banned” then we need to be sure this is not just something being done on a whim or on a spurious assumption, there needs to be a proper legal process.

Over the past few days police have arrested three people believed to be planning to behead effigies at the wedding. They were detained by police in Brockley, south-east London, on Thursday night.

These people have presumably been detained under the law which says that planning a terrorist act is an offence? Again, the BBC doesn’t seem to have asked any further questions. Were they charged? What with? Or were they merely quietly released again after the wedding? Am I committing an offence if I am planning to burn an effigy on November 5th?

There were also several raids on squats across London, which drew criticism from one Labour backbencher. John McDonnell accused police of "disproportionate" action, saying the raids appeared to be "some form of pre-emptive strike".

These are presumably the pre-emptive arrests of which Teresa May spoke in her advance trail of the measures she was “considering” after the Black Bloc’s window-breaking protests on 26 March. The people arrested in the squats were arrested for electricity abstraction – bypassing the meter. They have probably been doing it for months, if not years. They could have been arrested at any time for it, but coincidentally, police swooped the day before the Rile Widding. Coincidence? You decide.

As I said at the start, any large public event carries with it inevitable issues of public safety and security, even on the basic level of making sure no one gets trampled in the rush. And yes, I accept that – given that we’ve annoyed every hothead east of the Euphrates and a good many nearer home – there might be some people who want to use such an event to cover terrorist outrages. It’s all very lamentable. And in any large gathering of people, statistically there are going to be a few lags, perverts and ne’erdowells. So yes, policing is necessary. Up to a point. But when it gets to the stage where we’re stifling legitimate protest, we have to say, I think, that it’s time to take a good long hard look at where this is going.

Personally, I would let the protestors protest. In the case of the more zany fringe groups, it would show some of them up for the unsupported talentless loonies that they really are. If the whole world can see that there are only twelve members of “Muslims against Crusades”, that shows the world exactly what you are dealing with here. I would have stuck them in some obscure corner of Horse Guards Parade, suitably policed, and let them get on with it. Because the freedom not to be part of this, the freedom to hold contrarian views, however far they are off the bus route, is still one of the things that makes us the good guys.

And personally, I can’t see how you can describe any event where it has to be stage managed to stifle those who disagree with it, and pushed through at gunpoint by the presence of snipers on rooftops, as in any way “happy”.

Good luck, if you want to pretend that the whole country rose up as one great spontaneous street party and boogied long into the night. It didn’t, but feel free to delude yourself. For my part, the Royal Family is only useful for one thing. As a constitutional wedge to stop the bastard politicians taking over forever and issuing a written list of everything you are allowed to do, and everything else is verboten.

So if we have to have the occasional Rile Widding to keep the unwritten constitution intact, so be it. But don’t use it as an excuse to stifle legitimate protest, and don’t expect me to enjoy it. Just pull my vest down when you’ve finished.

The Streets of London

I touched on this in an earlier post, but I am definitely seeing signs of a concerted effort to "clean up" London in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. I don't mean sweeping up the rubbish, I mean a concerted effort to crack down on various freedoms and protests, and a further targeting of the disadvantaged, all as part of the process of packaging London for the (increasingly desperate, given Osborne's mishandling of the economy) sales, business, and tourism boom which is what the Olympics is all about these days.

Westminster Council is trying to banish the homeless by banning people from feeding them.

Boris Johnson (aided and abetted again by Westminster Council) is going through the courts to try and get rid of Brian Haw and his anti-war protest in Parliament Square.

There have been various reports on Indymedia about eastern European vagrants in the East End being rounded up and deported back to their country of origin. The UK is allowed to do this to homeless foreign nationals provided they are going back to a hostel or similar in their own country, and apparently the deportation often happens, but the hostel at the other end doesn't.

Finally, of course, following those dickheads from Black Bloc smashing bank windows on Saturday, Theresa May must have been chortling into her Horlicks that night as she seamlessly began the process of tightening up the policing of demos, talking about barring "known troublemakers" (ie anyone who disagrees with Cameron) from the right to protest. Well done, Black Bloc. Home Secretary 1 (black bloc, o.g.) Black Bloc 0. The pretext currently being used for this is the upcoming Royal Wedding, but given that the Olympics is following on in relatively short order behind this, I doubt anything brought in for the Royal Wedding is going to be repealed before the Olympics (or after it, come to that!)

We know already of course, that finding massive numbers of police from the secret deep freeze underneath Scotland Yard where they keep them in cryogenic suspension until there is a foreign tyrant who wants his goon squad to be able to run through London with the Olympic flag, or there's a miners' strike or something, is never a problem for the government. It's only when you are being robbed, mugged or raped that there is rarely a bobby on the beat.

I could be wrong. Maybe it is too early to discern a pattern emerging. But I will be watching this.

Cut to the Quick

There is a cruel joke doing the rounds at the moment based on the question "What's the difference between Bob Quick and Josef Fritzl?" The answer being, at least Fritzl remembered his binder. But, in truth, the resignation of Bob Quick, senior anti-terror plod of plods, is no joke, and should really be a matter of concern for us all, or at least, the manner in which it was engineered and executed should.

The bald facts of the case appear to be that he was snapped by a photo-journalist with a long-lens camera as he emerged from a car outside Number 10, where he was due to address a meeting of "Cobra", the rather melodramatically-named Government emergency committee. (You just know, don't you, that the name of that committee was thought up by a middle aged man with an Aston Martin and a James Bond fetish). The subject of his address was "Operation Pathway", not as you might first think, a crackdown on rogue landscape gardeners, but in fact a joint police/MI5 operation against a suspected Al Q'aida terror cell, who were planning some kind of major outrage in the North West.

So far, so predictable. Unfortunately, and rather absent-mindedly, in my view, Mr Quick had a sheaf of papers under his arm, in plain view, which, when the photographers' snaps were downloaded, gave the full S. P. on "Operation Pathway", including names, dates, and addresses. Cue a massed panic in the upper echelons of the security services, bringing forward the operation by 12 hours, and cue, eventually, also, the resignation of Mr Quick.

We don't know, of course, all of the machinations behind the scenes, which went on overnight, before Boris Johnson of all people popped up on the Today programme the next morning and cheerfully but "regretfully" (his own word) blew the embargo agreed by various parties over the official announcement of Quick's departure, no doubt then going home to crack open a "regretful" bottle of bubbly and let off a few "regretful" celebratory fireworks!

Somehow, anyway, overnight, it seemed to have been decided that Bob Quick's position had become "untenable", although previously, both Caroline Flint and Hazel Blears, both ministers of the Crown, on separate occasions, had been photographed carrying similar sensitive briefing papers into Downing Street, yet had escaped the chop. And, of course, the people to whom Bob Quick tendered his resignation have one or two pressing matters of their own to attend to, regarding second homes and expenses, that might well result in them discovering that, with resignations, as with so much else in life, it is more blessed to give than to receive. Time will tell, but the supreme irony of course is Boris Johnson, of all people, receiving the resignation of anyone for incompetence. That really is irony beginning to eat itself, tail-first. like those mythical heraldic sea-serpents that used to illuminate the margins of medieval seafarers' maps.

The conspiracy theorists have already been hard at work since Mr Quick's unfortunate career demise. The wackiest theory I have seen so far is that he engineered his own downfall and dismissal, in preparation for some as yet undisclosed secret mission under deep cover, still working to undermine an unsuspecting Al Q'aida, from some nameless bunker deep under Whitehall. Others have extended and built on this theory to say that the whole plot was manufactured by the security services, to keep us cowed and paranoid. That, I mus admit, I actually find slightly more believable, given the propensity of the anti-terror police to swoop down and arrest people with the maximum publicity and alarum, only to release them again, very quietly, and without comment, a few weeks later. As to Al Q'aida being wrong-footed, I doubt they care on speck of bat-crap who is in charge. As I have said before, these are the people who put the "mentalist" into "fundamentalist" and they are all mad as a runaway pram full of burning poodles.

But Mr Quick probably had enemies nearer home that he should have been worried about, other than the Clitheroe Branch of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. An even more extremist hotbed of loonies and zealots - The Conservative Party, since it was he who organised the arrest of Shadow Home Secretary Damian Green, inside the House of Commons, for "grooming the mole!" This was probably what underlay Boris Johnson's gleeful (I'm sorry, that should of course read "regretful") hooting on the morning of the resignation itself.

It is a sad day, though, coming back to why we should all be concerned, when a senior police officer can be so easily be forced out of his job, by a combination of political and media pressure, for what seems to be a relatively minor cock-up, one caused probably by a combination of absent-mindedness and the pressures and stress of work. It doesn't bode well for the checks and balances of the English legal system generally, and the separation of the powers, and all those other liberties and rights that lie locked up in those rows of dusty tomes and law books that it seems no one will acknowledge until it's too late.

Apart from anything else, I understand that it's now an offence under certain circumstances to photograph a police officerin the course of his duties. And photographing, and subsequently publishing, a document clearly marked "secret" surely contravened the Official Secrets Act. Much as I am amazed to find myself painted into a corner where I find myself defending the police against the media, and much as I violently disagree with the law against police photography on principle, nevertheless if it is the law, it should be applied universally across the land, without fear or favour, and not selectively, and therefore I look forward to the rule of law being upheld and the photographers being arrested and charged at least under the O.S.A.

This was not the only example of course, of laws being selectively or inappropriately applied over recent days. The arrests which the police carried out in Exeter, of protestors against the G20 Summit, immediately before that unhappy event, were carried out under the Anti-Terror legislation. I have previously said that, once the web of restrictive and anti-libertarian anti-terror laws is in place, there is nothing to stop the Government of the day using it against any sort of perceived threat, and potentially to stifle any legitimate protest, and it looks like I was right. There are plenty of existing laws about unathorised use of fireworks.

I was originally going to write more about that aspect of the G20, but it is now overshadowed by another episode where the police did not emerge very photogenically, the sad death of Iam Tomlinson at the G20 demo in central London. I don't think it is a good idea to write at length on this, actually, for various reasons. I have no medical training, but even if I were a cardiac surgeon, I am not skilled in the art of long distance internet autopsy. In short, I don't know if Ian Tomlinson's heart would have stopped beating when it did anyway. The most you can say, until the professionals pronounce on it, is that probably being whacked with a baton and thrown to the ground while under stress anyway (because it seemed he couldn't get home owing to the road to his hostel being blocked off) wouldn't have helped matters.

The complete lack of long distance fully-clothed-autopsy skills hasn't stopped people jumping in with both feet and blaming the police for Mr Tomlinson's death, though, especially since the appearance of film clips on the internet that would seem to confirm him at the receiving end of police brutality. This, of course, is the flip side of the "surveillance society", that nowadays we live in such a goldfish bowl, such a bubble of Youtube and mobile phone clips and rolling news, that it is just as easy for us to film the police, as vice-versa.

As it stands, under this new law which I mentioned earlier, the one aiming to prevent people from photograhing the police, the person who shot the Tomlinson footage should also be prosecuted. Yet in this case, the footage would seem to be clearly in the public interest, in establishing the facts, or indeed maybe even in establishing that the policeman actually had a good reason for treating Mr Tomlinson that way, should that ultimately prove to be the case. Any law which so clearly fails on two such widely diverse cases cannot be anything but a hinderance to justice, in the long run.

In the case of Mr Tomlinson, there are obviously enquiries to be made, a due process to be run, and conclusions to be arraived at in the end. It is important not to prejudice this process, but I will say just this: I hope that any enquiry looks also into the wider issues surrounding the cause of Mr Tomlinson's death.

It was an insane (and very costly) decision to hold the G20 meeting in central London, the more so since the various anarchists and other rentamob agitprop merchants who turn up and cause trouble at all peaceful demos, made it clear they were going to mount a major effort. The media were flagging it up for days in advance that there was going to be trouble, going to be a rumble. And as a result, the police themselves were obviously "pumped up" and "up for it". We always seem to be able to find hundred of extra police for events such as this, as well, and we have to wonder about their level of training and skill to deal with such situations. [As a sidebar, I also find myself reflecting if the next G20 summit could possibly be held in my driveway, so that the unprecedented police presence might just deter those scallies who nicked my car radio, from having another go.]

In short, the G20 was a policing accident waiting to happen, inept in conception, and fired up by the media's self-fulfilling prophecy of looting, anarchy and violence. Speaking as someone who remembers the death of Blair Peach at the hands of the SPG in 1979, I find myself reflecting sadly that little seems to have changed. It is no consolation whasoever for Ian Tomlinson, or his family, but maybe we were lucky to get away with just the one fatality.

We may not be so lucky next time.
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Shop Thy Neighbour

Meanwhile, the relentless march towards a total surveillance society continues. Two news stories in particular caught my eye in the last few days, and concatenating them together, you can see once again the machinery of government “spin” and misinformation being employed to make us all just a little bit more paranoid as we go about our daily round.

Apparently, MI5 and the security services generally are going to be asking if they can search people’s Facebook friends, on the offchance that one of them might be Osama Bin Laden. And in addition, the government is recruiting 60,000 “ordinary people” in the form of security guards, council officials and even shop assistants to be part of its new “front line” in the fight against an assumed increased threat of terrorism.

Now, leaving aside that any terrorists dumb enough to advertise the fact openly on Facebook, using their real names and listing “bombmaking” amongst their hobbies and interests, probably deserve to be arrested anyway, it is actually the second of those two stories that disturbs me more.

What we are recruiting here, is an army of neo-Stasis. Government informers, paid snitches, ready to denounce their neighbours for anti-social behaviour. Does this sound familiar? It certainly would do to Josef Stalin and Erich Hoenegger. Hitler would probably raise a distant eyebrow of recognition, whatever circle of Hell he currently resides in.

So once again, Britain, the country that I love, is being stolen away from me, inch by inch and yard by yard, by a sinister army of grey apparatchiks whose motto is “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”. Well. I am sorry, but that is bollocks. I have nothing to hide, but I fear for what we are becoming, and it is not pretty.

“Oh,” but you say, “it’s worth it if it prevents one atrocity”. Will it though? Everyone with a brain cell knows that real terrorists – if they are forced to communicate over the internet – use encrypted peer to peer networks. If GCHQ hasn’t worked that one out yet, they should give up and open a whelk stall. And at the end of the day, God forbid, if there was another attempt at something like 7/7 in the UK, that, unfortunately, is the price we pay for living in a free democracy instead of a society that is just one large prison camp, where some of us are prisoners and some of us are guards, which seems to be the government’s preferred option right now.

So, I’ll take my chances thanks. Let me die in my footsteps, I will not go down in the ground, as a certain Robert Zimmerman once memorably said.

If the government wants to re-invent the Stasi, it should be asking itself where Stalin is now. And what happened to the Berlin Wall. Those who live by the snoop, die by the snoop.

Mine's a Stella

The only surprising thing about the points which former MI5 chief Stella Rimington raised in her recent interview, in which she complained about the surveillance culture and the fact that we are living in a virtual police state fuelled by anti-libertarian legislation forced through on the pretext that it will somehow make us safer from terrorism, is that it was Stella Rimington who said it.

Other than that, it falls into the category of "an announcement from the Ministry of the Bleedin' Obvious". There can now only be a few remote indigenous people in the Kalahari who haven’t realised the underlying truth of what she said yet.

And the most chilling thing about it, was that the government didn’t really try and put up any counter argument. I mean, here you have the former head of MI5 – of all people – saying that this has all gone too far, and the government response is “Yeah, so what? What are you going to do about it?”